When Kara Finnigan communicates with her peers about reforming troubled school districts, she does so with journal articles such as “System-wide Reform in Districts Under Pressure: The Role of Social Networks in Defining, Acquiring, Using, and Diffusing Research Evidence.”

Or with presentations at academic conferences on such topics as “A Tale of Two Districts: The Importance of Collegiality in Urban Education Reform” or ”Using Social Network Analysis to Understand Leadership Churn Under Accountability Policies.”

But when the associate professor of educational policy at the Warner School wants to communicate with the policymakers who bring reform about — or with parents and other stakeholders who will be affected — she starts by talking about Horton the elephant.

That’s right: the Dr. Seuss character who placed a speck of dust on a flower and discovered Whoville inside.

Finnigan is not speaking down to her audiences when she talks about Horton; rather, she explains, she’s dangling a “hook” to attract and hold the audience’s attention. She’s acknowledging that scholars need to find different ways to communicate their work to non-academics if scholarly research is to have the broadest possible impact. “Otherwise, nobody’s going to pay attention,” she says.

The importance of this kind of public scholarship was brought home to Finnigan this year when she was one of 32 scholars chosen by the American Educational Research Association to participate in a series of events to better connect research and policy.

This included nearly two days of training in how to give TED-like “ED” talks to:

• Build a stronger bridge between research and policy.
• Strengthen understanding of the knowledge base in the field.
• Prompt dialogue.

“It was a very humbling experience for everybody,” says Finnigan. “These are top scholars who are used to having more time and space to get into the complexities. These are scholars who want you to know the complexities.”

Instead they had to do just the opposite. They had to limit their presentations to five to six minutes. They had to concentrate on key points. Avoid academic jargon. Find a “hook” that non-specialists could relate to.

And they had to think at least as much about their presentation skills as their content. Speaking clearly. Making eye contact. Not cluttering the slides with too much data.

“They forced us to think about the bare bones ideas that we want to make sure people take way. The purpose is to engage people enough so they will then want to go to the papers and other things you’ve done for more information,” Finnigan says.

She’s pleased by the feedback she’s received, not just from the talks, but the blogs she writes (click here for an example) to communicate her findings.

“I didn’t realize how much people had an appetite for this, until I tried these different mechanisms,” she says.

“As academics, we tend to sit in our silos, but the cross-fertilization that occurs when we step out of those silos is what can really bring us to new levels. This is not just about getting my information out for somebody else to take up. I get information back, which pushes me further.”

And yes, the “hooks” do work, she says. People who have heard her ED talk will later meet her, for example, and say, “Oh, I remember. You talked about Horton.” It’s an easy shorthand instead of having to remember a talk’s actual title.

So what does Horton the elephant have to do with school reform?

When Horton looked very closely at that speck of dust, he discovered a community that everybody else overlooked. It provides a nice analogy for Finnigan’s premise that successful reform of troubled K-12 school districts requires a close look at the layers of the system, in order to build stronger relationships, for example, between central office administrators and school-based principals. It also requires focusing on geographic inequities that concentrate students from the poorest neighborhoods in inner city schools.

“Too often we pay too much attention to simple solutions without paying attention to the underlying complexities and layers of an educational system that need to be tended to,” Finnigan says.

Studies going back several years have shown that playing action video games can help improve visual acuity. A new study by vision scientists at the University of Rochester and Vanderbilt University found that children with poor vision see vast improvement in their peripheral vision after only eight hours of training via kid-friendly video games. Most surprising to the scientists was the range of visual gains the children made, and that the gains were quickly acquired and stable when tested a year later.

“Children who have profound visual deficits often expend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to see straight ahead, and as a consequence they neglect their peripheral vision,” said Duje Tadin, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences. “This is problematic because visual periphery—which plays a critical role in mobility and other key visual functions—is often less affected by visual impairments.”

“We know that action video games (AVG) can improve visual perception, so we isolated the AVG components that we thought would have the strongest effect on perception and devised a kid-friendly game that compels players to pay attention to the entire visual field, not just where their vision is most impaired,” said Tadin, who is also a professor in the Center for Visual Science. “As a result, we’ve seen up to 50 percent improvement in visual perception tasks.” Read more here.

(This is part of a monthly series to help principal investigators understand their role in ensuring that human subject protection requirements are met in their studies.)

Effective January 1, 2017, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will require all funded “investigators and staff who are involved in the conduct, oversight, or management of clinical trials” to be trained in Good Clinical Practice (GCP).   The policy further requires investigators to take a refresher GCP training course every three years.

NIH defines a clinical trial as “a research study in which one or more human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions (which may include placebo or other control) to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes.”

Based on the language in the policy, the Office for Human Subject Protection (OHSP) anticipates the requirement may be fulfilled via one of the mutually recognized GCP training platforms identified through TransCelerate BioPharma, Inc., including training available through the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI), which is free to all University of Rochester study personnel. Directions for accessing this training are available on the OHSP website.

OHSP does not anticipate the University-required human subject protection training completed through CITI will meet this requirement.

Study personnel are responsible for maintaining all documentation related to completion of GCP training; OHSP is not monitoring GCP course completion through CITI. If you have questions regarding this mandate, please contact Kelly Unsworth or your NIH program officer directly.

Cardiologists at Strong Memorial Hospital have introduced a new implantable, miniaturized, wireless monitoring sensor to manage heart failure and reduce the number of times people with this life-threatening disease need to be hospitalized.

The CardioMEMS HF System measures pulmonary artery pressure, which is an indirect measure of worsening heart failure. A monitor built into a pillow allows the system to transmit daily information from patients’ homes directly to the heart failure team at Strong Memorial, allowing for personalized and proactive care to reduce the likelihood of hospitalization.

“This technology is innovative and benefits patients who may suffer with worsening heart failure well before we were able to detect it,” said Leway Chen,  associate professor of medicine and director of the  Program in Heart Failure and Transplantation. “The sensor lets us detect changes in a patient’s heart function that could significantly risk their health and require hospitalization.” Read more here.

A new University study sheds light on how parents and caregivers of children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) can best help their kids and at the same time maintain peace at home and at school.

“Children with FASD often have significant behavior problems due to neurological damage,” says Christie Petrenko, a research psychologist at the University’s Mt. Hope Family Center. Petrenko and her colleagues found that parents of children with FASD who attribute their child’s misbehavior to their underlying disabilities—rather than to willful disobedience—tend to use pre-emptive strategies designed to help prevent undesirable behaviors. These strategies are likely to be more effective than incentive-based strategies, such as the use of consequences for misbehavior, given the brain damage associated with FASD.

The study included 31 parents and caregivers of children with FASD ages four through eight. Petrenko and her team analyzed data from standardized questionnaires and qualitative interviews that focused on parenting practices. Petrenko says that the study, which is published in Research in Developmental Disabilities, shows that educating families and caregivers about the disorder is critical. Read more here.

Two University faculty members who have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Nina Schor is the William H. Eilinger Chair of Pediatrics and the pediatrician-in-chief at Golisano Children’s Hospital. She has spent much of her career investigating neuroblastoma, which is among the most common childhood cancers. Daniel Weix,  associate professor of chemistry, is a specialist in organic synthesis. He works on developing better ways of creating molecules in order to accelerate the discovery of new, useful compounds.

Two Hajim School faculty members — Sandhya Dwarkadas, the Albert Arendt Hopeman Professor of Engineering and chair of computer science, and Robert Boyd, professor of optics — who have been named fellows of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), the world’s largest association of technical professionals.  The distinction is reserved for select IEEE members for extraordinary accomplishments in their field. Boyd’s citation is for contributions to the fields of nonlinear optics and photonics; Dwarkadas’ citation is for contributions to shared memory and reconfigurability.

Patrick Oakes has joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy as an assistant professor.  Oakes is an experimental biophysicist whose research lies at the interface of physics and cell biology. He focuses on how mechanical interactions can act as signaling and regulatory mechanisms in fundamental cellular processes. Oakes applies an interdisciplinary approach that combines quantitative microscopy with computational modeling and genetic perturbations to probe mechanical interactions in systems of purified proteins, individual cells, and multicellular ensembles. At Rochester, Oakes aims to create a collaborative interdisciplinary laboratory that works closely with researchers from other departments, including those at the Medical Center. He earned his PhD at Brown University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago as part of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics, the James Franck Institute, and the Department of Physics.

New and junior faculty members can learn about applying for National Science Foundation grants at a workshop from 9-11:30 a.m., December 16, in the Gamble Room of Rush Rhees Library.

Sponsored by the office of the AS&E dean for research, the workshop will include:

1. Tips for preparing a compelling application.
2. University programs and resources that can help with broadening a proposal’s impact and participation.
3. Observations from a panel of faculty members who have served as NSF reviewers.

RSVP by December 13 to ECMRSVP@UR.Rochester.edu

The Office for Global Engagement is hosting an informational session for those interested in learning more about researching and building connections in Ghana.

The session, from 11 a.m. to noon, December 7, in Douglass 407, is geared toward those who have already worked in Ghana as well as those who are interested in engaging.

Rochester faculty members who have ongoing projects and relationships will give short presentations.  RSVP to global@rochester.edu.

The National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Program supports well-researched books in the humanities intended to reach a broad readership.

Although humanities scholarship can be specialized, the humanities also strive to engage broad audiences in exploring subjects of general interest. They seek to deepen our understanding of the human condition as well as current conditions and contemporary problems.

The Public Scholar Program aims to encourage scholarship that will be of broad interest and have lasting impact. The application deadline for projects beginning September 2017 is February 1, 2017. Click here for more information.

The New York Stem Cell Foundation recently released three RFAs: Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stem Cell Investigator Award, and Neuroscience Investigator Award.

The stem cell foundation supports and trains the next generation of scientists, both at the postdoctoral level as fellows, and as investigators pursuing innovative work that translates research into cures.

Applicants must submit an institutional report card for gender equality in order for their application to be considered complete. Click here for funding FAQs.

Cheng Li, Electrical Engineering, “Energy-Efficient NoC Router Design with Adaptive Fault-Tolerance.” 10 a.m., Dec. 2, 2016. Computer Studies Building 426. Advisor: Paul Ampadu.

Lisong Xu, Materials Science, “A Device Engineering and Degradation Mechanism Study of All Phosphorescent White Organic Light-Emitting Diodes.” 1 p.m., Dec. 2, 2016, Dewey 2110D. Advisors: Ching Tang and Lewis Rothberg.

Alexis Stein, Biology, “The Role of Homologous Recombination in the Maintenance and Repair of the Mitochondrial Genome.” 1:30 p.m., Dec. 9, 2016, Goergen Hall 108. Advisor: Elaine Sia.

Aaron Mislivec, Physics, “Measurement of Charged Current Coherent Pion Production by Neutrinos on Carbon at MINERvA.” 9 a.m., Dec. 12, 2016. Bausch and Lomb 372. Advisor: Kevin McFarland.

Today: Applications due for Collaborative Pilot Studies and Junior Investigator Awards from the Wilmot Cancer Institute. Contact Pam Iadarola for more information.

Dec. 7: Office for Global Engagement information session on research and collaboration opportunities in Ghana. Includes short presentations by University faculty with ongoing projects there. 11 a.m. to noon, Douglass 407. RSVP to global@rochester.edu.

Dec. 9: Deadline for initial applications for pilot project funding from the Environmental Health Sciences Center to investigate how the environment modifies stem cells, affects early life origins of adult disease, and host-pathogen interactions. Contact Michael O’Reilly for more information. Click here for the full RFA.

Dec. 16: AS&E workshop for new and junior faculty on applying for NSF grants. 9-11:30 a.m., December 16, Gamble Room, Rush Rhees Library. RSVP by December 13 to ECMRSVP@UR.Rochester.edu

Dec. 30: Deadline to submit proposals for two Breast Cancer Coalition research grants, one a maximum of $25,000 for pre- and post-doctoral trainee/fellows and the other $50,000 for faculty applicants. Click here for the full RFP.